Digital Marketing News: The Headline Hub

Each week, the Digital Surgeons team compiles the week’s news for designers, developers, online marketers, social media experts, and overall tech-lovers. For the geek-on-the-go, catch up on all the important headlines from the week with just one click!

Spotify

For over a year, we’ve been hearing about the popular European music service, Spotify, coming to the United States. After many delays, the service was able to get backing from four major music networks and launched Thursday. While it is still invitation-only for free accounts, users can purchase premium accounts (starting at $4.99) or get in through their Klout account.

Foursquare

Incentives were just rolling in for mobile check-in application FourSquare. Earlier this week, the company announced that it would be partnering with LivingSocial, Gilt City, zozi, and BuyWithMe to offer deals through the Explore tab. The seamless integration allows users to purchase the deal from their iPhone, Android, or Blackberry app.

In addition, Klout has added FourSquare as a means of measuring your online influence. Klout also factors in LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

Good news from RIM

After months of silence amid speculation that the company was dead, Research in Motion has announced seven new Blackberry devices by the end of the year, which the company hopes will come with Blackberry OS 7 among other features. It’s anyone’s guess how these smartphones will do in light of the recent negative feedback and decline in market shares. This announcement comes shortly after news that Blackberry App World reached its’ one billionth download.

TurnTable.fm

Music lovers have been flocking to Turntable.fm to DJ for their friends and discover new music. It seems that the music industry may have finally found a way to benefit from the experience. Thus far, music publications like Pitchfork and AbsolutePunk have created rooms for their fans. On Wednesday, however, Ra Ra Riot premiered its’ newest CD (out Aug. 2) on the site. Since users are able to ‘awesome’ or ‘lame’ a song, it is the ideal way of gauging feedback before a release.

Google

Boy, has it been a successful week for Google. Apparently, it wasn’t enough that Google Plus has reached an astounding 10 million users after only two weeks, despite still being in beta and invitation-based. On Thursday, the tech giant announced that it earned $9.03 billion in Q2 2011.

Highlight Reel
-Netflix ups their price to the outrage of users
-Android users get multiple accounts and push notifications for Twitter
-Tech Crunch get a new logo and website design
-MIT researchers teach computer how to play (and win!) Civilization. Seriously.